Many years ago a television series started and ended in quick order because reviewers didn't like it and so the advertising dollars didn't come strongly enough. That television series was... Star Trek. These days we know it to be a major industry with multiple TV and movie spinoffs. It also made the career of William Shatner - an actor who has since been a star elsewhere.

Here are the negatives from the Native American community in the periodical Indian Country.

What the reviewers and this periodical didn't do is actually watch the movie. Like the Batman series, Tonto is a troubled character. He is the person he is (as Batman is his character) because he witnessed his entire tribe being slaughtered after he as a child brought dieing white men into their tribe to be healed. I will not spoil the reason why. Anyhow... Tonto grew up an orphan, and spent his life trying to make good on an innocent childhood mistake that resulted in genocide. So you can understand a little why this modern Tonto was a bit "Johnny Depp." And it makes perfect sense.

And if you can believe the oral history I pass on from my great grandfather who fought first for the Union Army (age 14 from Ireland) and then on the Western Frontier, these kinds of atrocities were not uncommon.

It's just a bloody story. And not every character who happens to be this or that ethnicity needs to be Bill Cosby.

Somehow as an Irish, I get the ability to just f-ing get over yourself. If they can have this guy as a mascott...

... well then the rest of the world can put up with not always being portrayed as the perfect human. Tonto is a character who just happens to be Native American. And his ethnicity comes into play as any ethnicity would when it's part of man's inhumanity to man.

Just my opinion - worth what you paid for it.

- Bill

P.S. Not a bad Sanchin posture, although he is a poster boy candidate for Hair Club for Men.

of the movie. Read it and you will see why this piece of cinematic art will outlast the scathing critics who are want to draw attention to themselves by being the most clever in put-down. Such people frankly are failed writers themselves, reduced to commenting about the genius (or lack thereof) of others. But don't ask me what I really think.

Roger Ebert wrote:

It's as obsessive and overbearing as Steven Spielberg's "1941" — and, I'll bet, as likely to be re-evaluated twenty years from now, and described as "misunderstood."

THIS is why I started this thread on my forum. By coming on here telling you how much I loved this movie, I am revealing a bit of the closet "me" inside the traditional martial arts instructor that I am.

- Bill

Roger Ebert wrote:

This Lone Ranger is a decent man from the start, but he's serving corrupt masters without knowing it. By the end, his values are that of a brawny 1960s activist who insists that the stated values of America are great, but we haven't lived up to them. As film critic Walter Chaw put it, this movie's "a labor of love for a character so unbelievably square that he becomes symbolic of our disappointment in ourselves." By the end, the Ranger has become something close to an American Robin Hood — an outlaw-by-circumstance who understands the difference between brute force and true moral authority. That such concepts are being endorsed by a $200 million Walt Disney tentpole picture will seem either hypocritical or inspiring, depending on whether you like the movie. Either way, this is a lumpy bubblegum blockbuster with a bitter aftertaste, overlong but dazzling, built of borrowed bits yet defiantly its own thing.

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